The best true stories are always the most improbable ones and the story of Andre Stander an Afrikaner police officer, who after becoming disillusioned with the Apartheid regime he was helping support turned to increasingly brazen and flashy bank robberies to sate his lust for escapist thrills and becoming a legend in his home country, is most surely one of the better ones out there..

You seriously couldn't make stuff like that up and expect to be taken seriously, but it did happen and Stander is a suitable movie to capture this.

Brash, flashy and possessing an air of cool most Hollywood movies would kill for Stander's main set pieces the robberies are easily the best thing about it. Thomas Jane is brilliantly ballsy as Andre Stander and just as the robberies become more and more OTT so does Stander. By the start of the spree he's a nervous chancer, by the end he's a recklessly brazen character a man that in a way seems to have a deathwish, anything to live a little.

It's not all fun and games, Stander is damaged goods a man haunted by personal demons and his two partners in crime Allan Heyl and Lee McCall bring their own substantial personalities and faults to the table as well. The interplay between the 3 men works well and provides some grounding the further into the movie one goes.

The start and end are nicely grim bookmarks to the free riding middle and if only Thomas Jane made movies like this on a more regular basis he'd be a big Hollywood A lister.

One of the best Heist movies of the past 20 years? Definetly.

A

B+/A-


That definitely was a very pleasant surprise. I couldn't say it better than Gulli when he said that "You seriously couldn't make stuff like that up and expect to be taken seriously". Some of the stuff that apparently happened their is so crazy, brazen and out there that it just had me in awe over all the coolness. My favorite scene is probably when they turn the car around and go back to rob the same bank for the second time on the same day, hehe.

Thomas Jane is very convincing here (his moustache, not so much sadly), probably in the best performance I've seen of him so far. Deborah Kara Unger is very solid as his wife as well.The Apartheid setting is worked very well into the film and Jane's performance conveys the character's desillision with the system and his guilt-ridden feelings very well. I'm not sure the scene with him confessing the murder to the father of the dead son was really necessray, but since it apparently actually happened...

I think what I wished would be more here were the other characters from Stander's gang. I know, this is a movie about Sander, but I wish they had been characterized a bit more deeply in the end as they seemed like some interesting personalities as well. Overall, the film is a good blend of drama and a cool heist flick. You won't see such brash and feisty heists in any movie anytime soon, I promise.